Thursday, October 15, 2015

How Much Protein Is Enough?

The usual answer to the question of how much protein we need is "More, more, more." The truth is, there are both maximum and minimum daily requirements for protein, and getting either too much or too little is problematic for general health. I think it's helpful to consider the question of how much protein in context.

Many sincere seekers of
the ideal diet, especially Paleo dieters, tend on getting enough of the
micronutrients. They try to build a diet around vitamins, minerals, and
antioxidants.

Or people focus on the
anti-nutrients. These are gluten (the potentially toxic protein in wheat, rye,
barley, and oats), lactose (the milk sugar that requires the production of the
enzyme lactase for its digestion), phytate (a component of plant foods that is
particularly abundant in whole grains), or lectins (the toxic compounds in
plant foods such as beans).

The problem with this
approach is that it “majors on the minors.” Where many Paleo fans and people of
similar dedication go astray is in getting just enough, but not too much or too
little, of the five macronutrients. The five micronutrients are:

Alcohol is not an
essential macronutrient, but it is so commonly consumed that it is worthy of
explanation in terms of healthy diet. It's almost a matter of religious devotion for many people.

The Bible, after all, doesn’t tell us
that Jesus turned water into grape juice. The word in the Greek manuscript (οἶνον)
really does mean “wine.”

Fiber is essential food
for our probiotic bacteria rather than for ourselves. It is also an important
consideration in healthy diets, just not as important, as some diet gurus make
it out to be. And we all need protein, carbohydrate, and fat, but in the right amounts.

Despite what you may
have heard about nutrient ratios of the Zone Diet (which was based on research
of the most effective ratios of macronutrients for race horses, not people),
the fact is we don't need any exact ratio of protein, carbohydrate, or fat in
our daily diets. Our bodies do just fine as long as we get enough but not too
much, a healthy range of protein, carbohydrate, and fat. It’s not about ratios.
It’s about absolute minimums and maximums.

Regardless of the
ratios of nutrients, an adult woman's body on average:

• Needs at least 46
grams (184 calories) of protein per day, but cannot process more than about 200
grams (800 calories) of protein per day.

• Doesn’t “need” any
fructose at all, although it can benefit from small amounts, about the same
amount of fructose as would come from an occasional piece of fruit or an
occasional spoon of honey. A woman’s body can't process more than about 25
grams (100 calories) from fructose per day. It's OK not to consume any fructose
at all.

• Needs at least 40
grams (160 calories) of carbohydrates per day. The rest of the body's glucose
needs can come from protein the body does not use to repair itself. The body
breaks down extra amino acids into glucose and urea. The kidneys “alkalize”
urea with glutamate and/or calcium.

• Usually cannot
process more than about 150 grams (600 calories) of carbohydrate per day.

• Treats unsaturated
fat and monosaturated fat non-toxic in essentially any amount, although when
women consume too many calories overall, they gain weight. We’ll take a closer
look at what those fats are a little later.

• Treats
polyunsaturated fat non-toxic in amount of up to 100 calories (10 grams) per
day. Again, we’ll take a closer look at what polyunsaturated fat is a little
later.

• Needs just 0.6 grams
(6 calories) of omega-6 essential fatty acids per day if the diet includes 2.0
grams (20 calories) of omega-3 essential fatty acids. Women who consume more
than the minimum of omega-6's (and most women do) need far more omega-3's,
although both kinds of essential fatty acids can become toxic. It’s actually
possible to consume a toxic amount of fish oil, microalgae oil, or healthy
plant oils.

• Actually benefits
from moderate consumption of alcohol, as long as the alcohol is not consumed
with polyunsaturated fats. The combination of alcohol and fat, even “healthy”
fat, can turn non-toxic fat into toxic fat. It’s OK, however, to consume
moderate amounts of alcohol, if you can otherwise handle it, when you aren’t
eating lots of fatty foods. Jesus probably never had the disciples over for
wine and cheese.

Regardless of the ratio
of nutrients, an adult man's body on average:

• Needs at least 56
grams (224 calories) of protein per day, but cannot process more than about 230
grams (920 calories) or protein per day.

• Can't process more
than about 25 grams (100 calories) from fructose per day. As is the case for
women, it's OK for a man not to consume any fructose at all.

• Needs at least 50
grams (200 calories) of carbohydrate per day. As with women, the rest of a
man's glucose requirements can be satisfied by the conversion of excess amino
acids into glucose and urea. The kidneys alkalize urea with, ironically, one of
the amino acids, glutamate, or with calcium from bone, so it’s better for most
men to get at least some carbohydrate at every meal, just not too much.

• Usually cannot
process more than about 200 grams (800 calories) of carbohydrate per day.

• Treats
polyunsaturated fat as non-toxic in amount of up to 100 calories (10 grams) per
day.

• Treats unsaturated
fat and monosaturated fat non-toxic in essentially any amount, although when
men consume too many calories overall, they gain weight.

• Like women, needs
just 0.6 grams (6 calories) of omega-6 essential fatty acids per day if the
diet includes 2.0 grams (20 calories) of omega-3 essential fatty acids. Men who
consume more than the minimum of omega-6's need more omega-3 to balance them
out, but both kinds of essential fatty acids can become toxic, especially if
they are consumed at the same meal as alcoholic beverages are drunk. No fish
oil capsules with a whiskey chaser for healthy men.

• Needs fiber, but gets
enough from 5 servings of plant foods daily.

• Actually benefits
from moderate consumption of alcohol, as long as the alcohol is not consumed
with polyunsaturated fats.

Protein, carbohydrate,
different kinds of fat, fiber, and alcohol are all fine within limits, but it's
important not to get too much. Protein, carbohydrate, different kinds of fat,
and fiber are essential, and it's important to get enough. The question is, how
do you know how much is enough without weighing out your food?

Our Bodies Tell Us How Much Protein We Need

Just about everybody who
has access to protein automatically eats the right amount of protein. Just
about the only way you can get the wrong amount of protein in the modern world
is to pursue an intentionally extreme diet. There are some vegans who don’t
enough protein. (Dehydrated spinach has as much protein as steak, but nobody is
going to eat a big old plate of dried spinach without soaking it first.) Some
bodybuilders and excessively enthusiastic paleo dieters get too much protein,
more than their bodies can use, so the excess is turned into—horrors—sugar.
Although it wasn't the case in much of the world even 50 years ago, and isn’t
even now in a few places in Africa and Asia, just about everyone's diet today
provides plenty of protein. Certainly in the United States and Canada, there is
a real possibility of eating too much.

Our brains tell us we
have eaten enough protein when we have eaten enough of both carbohydrate and
protein. If we don't have carbohydrate-rich foods at our meals, our brains tell
us to keep on eating protein until we eat enough for both our protein needs and
our energy needs. That’s because the body can break down excess protein into
sugar. If we have both carbohydrate and protein foods at our meals, our brains
tell us we are satisfied when we have eaten a small amount of protein, since
the body prefers to make glucose from carbohydrates.

High-protein diets
cause high protein-hunger. But even on a high-protein diet, our brains tell us
when we have eaten enough. Protein is the predominant determinant of appetite.
If we ignore (or can't get) carbohydrate foods long enough, however, our brains
eventually tell us that other nutrients are missing, and we typically become
hungry for both protein and carbohydrate.

Whose diet in the twenty-first
century is most likely to be protein deficient? It turns out that it is the
modern hunter-gatherers, the very same people who eat a genuinely ‘Paleo diet’,
who are most at risk of protein deficiency. These people, like the modern bush
people of Botswana and Namibia, live an ancient lifestyle. They expend an
enormous amount of energy tracking, killing and preparing food.

Animals don’t
show up with signs saying “Please eat me,” so protein deficiency is a real
problem. If you have to track an animal for several days, shoot it with a
poisoned dart, run after it for miles as the poison takes effect, kill it, and
then carry it back 10, 20, or 30 miles back to your camp, it is easy to become
protein deficient.

Protein deficiency is
rare in most of the modern world. It is common in the very same countries where
the largest numbers of people actually follow hunter-gatherer lifestyles, in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Namibia, in Paraguay, and in the most
isolated parts of Indonesia.

When protein intake is
deficient, the body still has to use protein to make enzymes that enable life.
It will harvest protein from:

• The lining of the
gut, making it more permeable to allergens, infectious microorganisms, and
undigested components of food,

• The immune system,
reducing resistance to disease, and

• The kidneys and
liver, reducing their ability to “detoxify” and to process nutrients when
eating is resumed.

An infant can die of
protein malnutrition in as little as five days. Adults can hang on for six or
seven weeks, in some cases, even with no dietary protein at all, as the body
consumes itself to stay alive.

So, How Much Protein Do We Really Need?

The level at which most
adults are consuming neither so much protein that the liver has to transform it
into urea and sugar nor so little protein that the body has to break down its
own tissue is 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. For an
“average” woman weighing 57.5 kilos (127 pounds), the body stays in balance
when, on average, the diet provides 46 grams (184 calories) of protein daily.
The average 70-kilo (154-pound) man needs 56 grams (224 calories) of protein
every day.

What’s this in common
measurements? Men need about two ounces
of pure protein (not counting the water and carbs in protein food) per day, and
women need a little less.

Women are usually OK
eating a little bit more protein than the guidelines. Men are usually OK
getting a little bit less. But how could you get your 46 to 56 grams of
protein?

There are 50 grams of
protein in:

• About 100 grams
(3-1/2 ounces) of fresh herring. OK, that’s not really a North American food,
but here’s one that is.

Where advocates of
vegan diets go wrong is they mess up the math. They tend to confuse the amount
of protein in dried vegetables with the amount of protein in vegetables as we
actually consume them. Sure, there’s protein in veggies, but there’s nearly 100
times as much water that also has to be consumed to get the protein.

Advocates of vegan
diets would dispute the average of 46 to 56 grams per day recommended by the US
Department of Agriculture as a recommended dietary intake. They would say we
need only about half as much protein, or even less. But that still means we
need huge amounts of vegetables if were are going to depend on them as our only
source of protein. It's essentially impossible to go Paleo, and it’s
challenging even if you eat grains and tubers, without planning to eat at least
some meat. The real problem with meat for most of us, however, is eating too
much.

And How Much Protein Is Enough?

Both men and women,
sick people and healthy people, athletes and couch potatoes, can consume so
much protein that they begin to get sick. When the diet provides about 150
grams (600 calories) of protein per day, the body begins to convert excess
amino acids into glucose and urea. The kidneys, ironically, have to harvest
glutamine from muscle or calcium from bone to keep the pH of the bloodstream
constant, due to the acidity of the urea released in the degradation of
protein. By the time an adult is eating 230 grams (920 calories) of protein per
day, essentially all additional protein is turned into glucose and urea, and
urea can build up to toxic levels.

Whether or not
consuming a lot of protein is toxic depends on two factors:

• Whether the diet also
provides fat and

• The presence of
absence of certain toxic bacteria in the small intestine.

How do scientists know
this?

Early in the twentieth
century a Canadian ethnographer named Dr. Vilhjalmur Stefansson lived for over
a decade with the Inuit people of Canada's arctic north. For nine of those
years he ate nothing but meat and fish, a diet similar to that of his hosts. In
his memoirs, Stefansson noted the skepticism of the nutritionists of his day
that human beings could survive on protein food alone:

“A belief I was
destined to find crucial in my Arctic work, making the difference between
success and failure, life and death, was the view that man cannot live on meat
alone. The few doctors and dietitians who thought you could were considered
unorthodox if not charlatans. The arguments ranged from metaphysics to
chemistry: Man was not intended to be
carnivorous - you knew that from examining his teeth, his stomach, and the
account of him in the Bible. As mentioned, he would get scurvy if he had no
vegetables in meat. The kidneys would be ruined by overwork. There would be protein
poisoning and, in general hell to pay.”

By the time Dr.
Stefansson was publishing his memoirs, however, he and another arctic explorer,
named Andersen, agreed to eat an all-meat diet for an entire year under the
supervision of doctors of New York City's Belleview Hospital (no, not in its
famous psychiatric department, in the medical ward). The findings of the
experiment published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. It is only fair to
note that the costs of the study were subsidized by a grant from the American
meat packers association.

Stefansson insisted on
being fed a diet of lean meat without fat to demonstrate the problems he
encountered in the Arctic. While on this protein-only diet, he began to
experience nausea and vomiting after just two days. When Stefansson and
Andersen went back on a meat and fat diet, however, they experienced no
particular problems. In fact, they appeared to be in “the best health of their
lives.”

You and I, however, are
not Arctic explorers. We may not be in the best health of our lives. For us, it
might be a good idea to minimize our total meat consumption, and even to eat a
little fat with the meat. But how much meat is too much? To get to the “danger
zone” for human protein metabolism, 230 grams of protein per day, we would need
to consume:

• 1100 grams (2-1/2
pounds) of lean ham.

• 1120 grams (2-1/2
pounds) boneless chicken.

• 1200 grams (2-3/4
pounds) of lean chuck roast.

• 8 kilos (18 pounds)
of silken tofu (whether it's a good idea to eat tofu is another issue).

• 10-1/2 kilos (over 20
pounds, over 4 gallons) of chopped spinach.

Advocates of vegan
diets insist that it is impossible to consume enough plant foods to build up
toxic levels of protein. They are absolutely right. People who eat hunks of
meat several times a day ignore the very real possibility of consuming too much
protein, especially if the protein is consumed without fat (that is, the meat
is strictly muscle meat, without any organ meats, marrow, or marbling). But
most of us really are safe from either extreme as long as we avoid advice from
diet purists.

3 comments:

Vegans don't eat only low protein vegetables -- for example you didn't list any legumes. And people don't need to get their entire protein requirement from one food. Since almost all foods contain some protein, it would make more sense to look at all of the food consumed per day and analyze that.

I've pursued a vegan diet myself. Plant foods can provide all the needed amino acids. It's the ratios of the amino acids that are problematic, and the fact that plant foods are higher in water content. You consume more bulk to get your protein. I'd say that it makes sense to extend your time frame out to about 48 hours since some amino acids are buffered--but that isn't the point I wanted to make here.

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